Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to telecommunications and more specifically to techniques for providing chunk loss recovery for a group of chunks communicated across a network.
Data loss may occur when transferring data in chunks across an unreliable network. For example, data may be broken into chunks of data, which are sent through the unreliable network. The chunks may be sent using any medium transfer unit, such as packets, cells, etc. When time-sensitive information, such as time division multiplex (TDM), constant bit rate (CBR), variable bit rate-real time (VBR-RT), etc. information, suffers any loss of information, the quality of the communication is greatly reduced. For example, if the data loss is large for data sent during a telephone call, a conversation may become unintelligible.
Accordingly, a transmitter may provide techniques for recovering data loss. For example, the transmitter may use complete redundancy where a redundant chunk for each chunk is also transmitted to the receiver. Thus, if a chunk is lost, it is possible that the redundant chunk that was sent may be received and used in place of the lost chunk. Complete redundancy, however, uses a large amount of bandwidth because double the amount of chunks have to be sent to a receiver. This may increase overhead and also cause congestion at the receiver, which has to process double the amount of chunks for data being sent.
Also, if no redundancy is used, the overhead is low but any chunks lost cannot be recovered. Thus, the quality of the data transmission at the receiver may be adversely affected.